RAVE, RAVE against the lying of the Right!

Monthly Archives: November 2016

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, the 17th President of Cuba, has lost his battle with thermodynamics.

In a divided world, Fidel ruled for all Cubans—whoever they voted for.

They say the President was more like a father to his people: fondly doling out a few dollars’ pocket money every year, telling them who they could and couldn’t date, being older than them, grounding them if they got lippy, coming home with his drink on and beating Che Guevara (who was like their mother) for over-microwaving his dinner.

The ruling Party’s Party Planning Committee will release fireworks every night for the next 40 nights to remind Cubans to continue mourning.

At a time when all too many Cubans had lost actual parents to the terrors of the People’s Revolution, a strong paternal figure was just what the doctor ordered to heal a hurting nation.

But like any carer of the wounded, el Comandante bore a cross he could never share with the very population closest to his heart. Castro was haunted by workaholism most of his adult life. So all-consuming was his devotion to public service that he agreed to serve as President for decades (a sacrifice that must have seemed superhuman to his many one- and two-term American counterparts). Only in 2008 did Castro finally ask his ‘children’s’ permission to retire, knowing that if he waited for them to vote him out, he could be waiting forever.

Fidel was said to be as surprised as anyone when the next-best man for the Presidency on the entire island turned out to be his own kid brother, Raúl.

Having barely turned 72 when this greatness was thrust upon him, Raúl Castro symbolized the thinking, the energy and the aspirations of a new generation of Cubans. Happily, ‘Castro 18’ soon demonstrated a political genius far beyond his years, silencing the pessimists who’d written him off as a callow young playboy, along with their families.

The nation’s favorite son has died doing what Cubans loved most: regaling them with an anecdote about his youthful adventures. Fidel’s last words not only held a baseball stadium of ordinary Cubans captive for three hours straight this morning, but seemed to be on the verge of making a point.

About what, historians of rhetoric will still be debating a century from now. But if you put a gun to their head, say witnesses, Fidel was probably building up to the announcement of a new, socialist ornithology. An ornithology of the people.

In a divided world, Fidel ruled for all Cubans—no matter who they voted for.

Ironically, the former President’s penchant for dramatic, mid-word silences (with which he was known to keep audiences in suspense for 120 minutes or more) may have led to critical delays in diagnosing his death.

“At first we assumed, like everyone else: el Comandante is fine, he’s just pausing for effect,” explained Dr. René Vallejo, one of twelve personal physicians on duty at Fidel’s standing-room-only lecture in the Havana Goodtime Dome.

The interlude was beginning to trouble Vallejo, he says, when he had to leave on a compulsory meal break. When the doctor got back to the stadium a few hours later, breathless from sprinting, the 18,000-strong crowd was still waiting “in an atmosphere of pin-drop quiet” for Castro’s next syllable.

To interrupt the motionless, slumped-over Demosthenes at that point—just when his silence was nearing peak pregnancy—would have been unthinkable, felt Dr Vallejo.

“Then at last we saw the signs, in the amber gloaming: the signs of rigor mortis setting in,” he told reporters this evening. He has no recollection of the seconds that followed. Adrenalin and muscle memory kicked in, and suddenly he was up on stage, flanked by a phalanx of paramedics, nurses and specialists at the President Emeritus’ side.

But there was nothing they could do. The rigor mortis had gone too far.

The last living guerrilla was dead.

An epidemic of whooping and dancing—classic responses to bereavement in many cultures—spread outwards from Havana at the speed of sadness this afternoon. For the men, women and children of this island paradise, suicide will be the only escape from the lugubrious alarum of the vuvuzuela tonight as a million cheeks execute Latin America’s one-note answer to Danny Boy. But for every grief-stricken reveler on the street, another ten Cubans will spend a noisy night at home, drowning their sorrows in champagne. So great has been the national outpouring (so to speak) that it’s no longer possible to buy a bottle of the Batista-era sparkling wine anywhere in the country.

Party-owned television is announcing that the next 32 to 35 days of spontaneous popular solemnity will be overseen by a special Party Planning Committee.

Meanwhile, just an intercontinental ballistic stone’s throw away, the people of Miami, Florida are determined to party ’til dawn in sympathy with their cousins across the Gulf.

Cuba’s superpower neighbor, which is barely 90 miles away on a clear day, owes the ethnic vibrancy of such metropolises as Miami, Tampa and Union City to one man—Fidel Castro—more than anyone else combined.

Barack Obama—the mestizo politician being trotted out to speak for the US regime’s interests this week—eulogized the bearded, iconoclastic icon as “a man without whom the great Diaspora of Cuba’s best and brightest people would never have been possible. Or necessary.”

Even Donald Trump, an apex capitalist who holds the real power in Washington, agreed that Castro’s pre-dawn cremation would be “a moment for Cuban-Americans and American non-Cubans to come together—not to mourn his death, but to celebrate his death.”

Nothing we say can possibly make ordinary Cubans feel any better right now.

But as a token of our tiny respect and sympathy, Climate Nuremberg will use a black font this week.

SIC SEMPER FIDEL.

Note: Whenever Fidel gives a public speech, audience casualty figures are reported on the back page of Granma, Cuba’s newspaper of record; this evening’s edition is no exception.

Proceedings at the Havana Goodtime megadrome today were officially fatality-free. The death of two males (F. Castro, 90, and J. Sepúlveda, 43) to suspected heat stress was cancelled out when an unnamed woman went into labor during the legendary orator’s opening remarks, quietly giving birth to twins at 6:12 and 6:20 pm.

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Well, well, well, it seems the first rat has accepted reality and scurried off the good ship HMS Avoidance.

Last time I checked out the hottest, most rapidly-heating-up new site in the deniosphere (which I try not to do—long story), climate “skeptics” were insisting the Pause had never stopped. It’s still happening, they cried—it’s just been “masked” by “short-term noise”! We haven’t had “long enough” (whatever that means) to pronounce death yet, quacked these often self-conferred MDs. It’s Not Statistically Significant!

So I suppose congratulations are in order for high-profile denioblogger Jaime Jessop, who evidently has the rat-cunning most of her conspecifics lack.

The title of Dr Jessop’s new post says it all. In fact, the first 3 words alone are rope enough (and can therefore be quoted out of all context, without the slightest ethical or intellectual qualms on our part):

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of this three-word admission, because I’m a science communicator, so every fibre of my being is viscerally opposed to hyperbole—which is literally worse than lying.

So I’ll just have to understate it:

This changes everything. The tectonic plates have shifted. The continents have realigned, and the constellations themselves are sure to follow.

What Dr Jessop has just conceded—gracelessly, backhandedly and teeth-clenchingly—is that there really was a pause in the Pause. To be sure, it’s over now—the pause in the pause has stopped, at least temporarily, and the pause is back, for the time being at least—but what matters is that the pause did stop, at some point. Just like we’ve been trying to get through their lead-lined calvaria this whole time.

I hate to say “I told you so,” but being a hero sometimes means doing things you hate. So here goes:

Breaking ranks is never easy, and Dr Jessop can expect to be called aside for a quiet word tonight. Bank on it. The pausist cause was just rewound by years, if not decades. There are going to be a lot of raised fingers and pointed voices in the denialist flatearthosphere in coming days, you can take that to your stockbroker.

What was she thinking?!, voices will demand to know. This won’t help the Cause of the Pause! Won’t somebody think of the Pause Cause?

Johannesburg, S.A.—With world attention fixed on the looming US election, outgoing President Obama has announced the launch of his foreign-policy brainchild, the so-called Africa Works Initiative.

The first consignment of eager Africans has already embarked for US shores and is expected at Baltimore sometime this afternoon. Officials in Washington say the trans-Atlantic migration and employment scheme, the first of its kind ever, will operate on a voluntary basis to begin with.

It’s traditional for the US President to devote his ‘lame duck’ years to projects that engage his personal passion but are unlikely to arouse opposition in Congress. Barack Obama has embraced this custom with gusto: Africa Works is said to have been at the heart of his vision for the new American workplace for years.

“Because Africa’s Greatest Natural Resource… Is Its People,” explained the President at a Washington, DC media conference earlier this month.

if it succeeds, ‘AfWorks’ would not only define Obama’s second term in office, but transform just about every aspect of US life—from the rural economy to the industrial landscape, even the makeup of the American people itself—forever.

But it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing. In an embarrassing open-mic incident on September 20, Rwandan President Paul Kagame groaned audibly as Obama took the lectern to promote the scheme.

“Great,” Mr Kagame was heard whispering to a colleague, “just what we need… another white man telling us how to run our country.”